F2F Artifacts

What a wonderful new world of tweeting and posting. Here are some of the first challenges and projects from our MSUrbanSTEM summer session.

Shoot & TweetMy first tweet! Trees have always been a source of amazement to me - just so beautiful and so complex.

Video Story ProblemNothing jazzes up a boring old word problem like some fun, creative video.

Cosmos Reading

I remember watching the original Carl Sagan Cosmos series on TV with my dad. It sparked my imagination way back then and rereading his masterpiece this summer was a true joy. It was fascinating to experience these ideas again with new eyes as an adult.

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Where does it STEM from Tweet

STEM is understanding this universe. I am stem, you are stem, we are stem and we are all together.

Ideas Photo Assignment

The alphabet is everywhere! Finding letters all around us was fun :)

​​STEM Meme

How do we put all of these great pedagogical ideas into practice in our classroom? It might not be easy & it might not work perfectly the first time, but it's worth the risk!

Amazing STEM Lesson Summary

​Students begin this activity about weighted averages by working together as a whole class to calculate an average. The scenario is a farming analogy, where each student has just welcomed a new litter of pretend piglets into the world. Note cards with cute photos representing the litters are distributed to each student, telling the students how many pigs are in their litter. I reward the fastest of my five classes that correctly determines the average number of pigs per litter in our farming community.

After having a student summarize her class’s method for calculating the average number of pigs per litter, students brainstorm alternative methods that might also work. This opens the door to using a weighted average to determine the answer. Students usually resist this solution initially for being harder or more time consuming than necessary, but with a quick change of scenario, the value of a weighted average is easy to spot.

Instead of imagining ourselves as farmers averaging pigs, we try to design a method for finding the average atomic mass of one particular element. Right away, it’s clear we could never collect all the atoms of an element in the whole universe, but what’s definitely doable is analyzing a representative sample of that element to determine what percent is what isotope. With this percent composition data and our new weighted average skills, finding the average atomic mass of an element is easy. Students finally see where those decimal mass values on the periodic table come from!